Talon Lacquer Developer

While good for starting fires, most talons were used for intimidation and puncturing beer cans.

My personal statisticians informed me this week that the median birthdates of you budding entrepreneurs fall between the years of 1990 and 1999. Good for you, young things! It is heartening to know that the moguls of tomorrow are looking to the moguls of today for their cues, and those of you who have found my advise and anecdotes are truly the mavens of your cohort. I have little hope that you will achieve the heights of greatness that I have attained, but it was easier to circumvent laws in my heyday.

Since you are all, on average, so young, you will perhaps only harbor the vaguest of memories of your mothers’ sharpened talons waving in front of your unfocused eyes while you suckled on the polymerized plastic nipple of your bottle. For me, the days when extreme nail adornment was in vogue are not so long past, many of you were perhaps not even forming coherent memories at this time. So the career bears mention.

It was a time of vice, a time when a shirts and Kool-Aid changed from one color to another at the drop of a hat. It was a terrifying time– cocktails had taken on alien hues, and Vanessa Williams had taken all our radio DJs hostage. Regular people like your parents were looking for protection. It occurred to me that as much as they were looking for actual protection from the dreaded Mickey Mouse Club and Kids Inc, they were looking for symbols of protection.

I’d been working on a new automobile paint formula on and off for the past decade prior to this, but I couldn’t the right environmental and safety committee approvals. Something about blinding incidence in trials due to the high gloss, and lethally pervasive fumes. I am rarely one to give up on product development, but I was at the end of my proverbial rope. That’s when it occurred to me– I was thinking on too large a scale. Perhaps if you ever run up against this roadblock, living in the age of nanotechnology, you should think about varnish for your nanobots.

In an early precursor to a social media campaign, I recruited a transnational folk force to grow out their nails to talon-length, varnish them with my high-gloss paint, and then interact with people in everyday situations: grocery stores, juice bars, popcorn and mustard shops, antique toy museums, wig emporia. Places that you likely visit on any given day.

Obviously the trend caught on in a flash. If you want to watch you parents squirm, just ask them how long their nails were in the 90s. And I’ll let you work out what that meant for nail varnish sales.